1976: Wallace
1980: Carter
1984: Hollings
1988: Gore
1992: Buchanan
1996: Clinton
2000: Gore
2004: Bush
2008: Huckabee
2012: Landrieu
2016: Webb
I thought I remembered you as somewhat of a moderate Republican, especially on social issues. Given the Southern Democrat love, was I mistaken? LOL.
This is mostly a function of the Republican runners-up being awful and my unusual infatuation with Jimmy Carter. Bob Dole and John McCain are some of my least favorite Republican politicians, and Santorum and Cruz are rather detestable as well.
I'm curious as to why the hate for Dole particularly.
The South and Midwest (especially Great Plains) have always competed over agricultural interests. Even though both of these regions today are mostly GOP, the tension remains. Bob Dole was pretty much the modern manifestation of Alf Landon-style Great Plains conservatism, and John McCain actually draws more from this school of Republican orthodoxy than the Bush/Rockefeller Northeastern Establishment or the "New South" Firebrands like Trent Lott or Saxby Chambliss.
Care to define Alf Landon conservatism and explain its repugnance?
Not sure I'd be able to explain it very intelligently, but I knew exactly what he meant. The Midwest (especially the Plains) has seemed to be the traditional home of post-1800s American conservatism, and I think it's maintained a more business-oriented, "dignified" approach to conservatism than (as Del accurately put it) the more "firebrand" style of Southern conservatives. Kind of like porn ... you know it when you see it?
Woah now, let's not take that Midwestern Republicanism is more "dignified" as a political axiom
To go into more differentiation on Southern vs. Midwestern Republicanism, I think you just need to look into the historical issues that brought each region into the GOP. In addition to its anti-slavery platforms, the early GOP was very supportive of economic initiatives especially beneficial to the Great Plains during the mid-19th century: homesteading, the Transcontinental Railroad, land-grant universities, etc. All of these issues represented what was, at the time, a very progressive platform. The South was very much against these same initiatives, mostly because the agricultural communities in the two regions were starkly different: the Midwest was dominated by small farmers who owned their own land and saw these improvements as a way to improve their economic competitiveness, whereas the majority of farm labor in the South was provided by slaves (and later sharecroppers and tenant farmers) employed by a small landholding gentry who saw the same improvements as threats to the continuation of the economic and social hegemony they enjoyed.
The end of the Democrats in the South was a direct result of the collapse of this agricultural system set into motion during the Great Depression by new government programs and increasing automation. Increasing automation greatly reduced the labor-intensity of production agriculture and pushed farm labor into new, more urban professions. In this new setting, the old sharecroppers were able to buy homes and become the foundation of the New South's "ownership society". Additionally, displaced Black farm labor was also pushed into more urban professions that brought them more physically and economically proximate to White Southerners (thus allowing the Civil Rights movement to catch fire). These two factors made the South ripe for a Republican Party pushing for a conservative message of low taxes and state's rights - in some ways the ideological opposite of the GOP's Midwestern "egalitarian progressivism" a century earlier.
Above all, I think this is a great example of how political parties primarily function in the United States to unite a broad, diffuse set of interests for the sake of winning national elections - not for promoting some ideologically consistent political theory or philosophy. Thus, the Republican Party in the 20th Century is the story of three united yet competing nuclei: Midwestern Progressives, the Northeastern establishment and the "New South" conservative reformers. However, this is probably a bit of an historical anachronism today as American politics is no longer as regional as it once was and these "nuceli" have been replaced with a generic "Red State/Blue State" cultural and political dichotomy. Makes for a 21st century political scene that's a lot less interesting, at least from an academic or historical standpoint anyway.
